A. Writing Task 2: Strategy

In A. Writing Task 2 the first thing you should do is read the first bold part because this will be the main topic of your essay. Then, underline key-words of important points that you need to consider. For example, let’s read our topic:

T.V. advertisements aimed at young children are far too many nowadays and they should be forbidden.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

This is our main topic. It is a statement that expresses a certain opinion and usually a bold opinion. Let’s underline key-words we need to consider in the first part of the topic. So, we have:

T.V. advertisements aimed at young children are far too many nowadays and they should be forbidden.

After your underlining, you will read the question in bold. The question tells you what you must do with the topic. In our example, they ask you if you agree or disagree with the main topic:

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

In this case, you should express your own personal opinion on the subject. In the end, you are going to see something like that:

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

So, here what do we need? For every argument we make, we need to provide reasons and examples in order to justify it and better explain it. This is crucial. If you don’t include reasons and examples in your essay, you will lose marks.

As you can see, in this task we are not going to be given any information as we were given in Task 1. In Task 2, we have to think of our own ideas and examples and of course we have to be able to justify them.

First of all, we need to be very organised in order to avoid the common problem of stating random ideas without any connection and without any cohesion. Do you remember the keywords we underlined in our topic? Now, it is the time to use them in our first paragraph! In our introduction. In your introduction, you need to paraphrase the topic statement and that’s it! You can also state your opinion if you like but since you will do this in your conclusion anyway, in your introduction you can just paraphrase the topic. In paraphrasing we use different words in order to describe the same thing. Let’s go!

T.V. advertisementsaimed at young children are far too many nowadays and they should be forbidden.

The underlined key-words are going to be our paraphrasing guide. So, we have:

“In the developing world, the amount of advertisements shown on T.V. is consistently increasing. The advertisements that target young children could not be an exception to this generally accepted rule and thus, there are a lot of people who claim that these advertisements should be banned from T.V. altogether.“.

As you can see, we express exactly the same thing with different words (of course words such as “advertising” cannot be paraphrased so we leave it as is). The only thing we need to do is to elaborate a little bit on the topic so as to form a paragraph of 4-5 lines. The above paraphrasing was just an example to help you.

Now that our introduction is ready, we need two paragraphs that will comprise the main topic and a conclusion. So, what are we going to write in these two paragraphs? Time to brainstorm a little bit. Just think of as many ideas as you can either for or against the topic and write them down in notes. At this point, don’t worry if these ideas are good or bad; don’t judge yourself, just come up with as many as you can. Your notes could look like this:

Agree

Disagree

-children want more and more/become greedy-no limits-parents cannot provide so many things-competition at school

-consuming society

-Advertisements are part of our worldà children should get used to it-learn to choose + put limits to their selves-bans are not the answer to everything: parents should teach children to be disciplined

Now, we just need to use some of these ideas in order to fill in our following paragraphs! If you are ready to do that, please go to the next lesson where we do exactly that and we outline the plan you need to follow. If you need extra clarifications on this lesson, you can also watch the video below:

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